Americans over 80 have lived through more than a third of our nation's 250-year history. We asked them why this moment feels different.
When we realized that this was America’s 250th official birthday, and when we heard that the president was planning to celebrate with a cage fight on the white House lawn and a big whopping arch in Washington, we scratched our heads to see if we could come up with a more appropriate way of marking 250 years of America’s official story.
What we did was realize that our older members, indeed anyone past their early 80s, has literally been around for one third of that 250 year span, which gives them a kind of baseline credibility for understanding how this moment is remarkably different from the other parts of our lives. It’s not that we haven’t been through hard times before. We’ve fought wars and protested them. We’ve lived through one kind of economic calamity after another.
But there’s something that feels very, very different about this moment that we’re in. And we hoped that some of our older members could put their finger on exactly what it is.
See what they have to say in their stories below!
